When it comes to artificial intelligence, I think that on a very basic level we're all either Jetsons people or Terminator people. You're either praying for a future where Rosie the robot maid irons all your shirts, or living in terror of the moment when Skynet becomes self-aware.

For those in the former camp, great news for you today: IBM has sent their Jeopardy-wiz supercomputer Watson to culinary school. No, really. Watson is currently spending time at the Institute for Culinary Education in New York, where it (he?) is inventing new, previously unheard-of ingredient combinations. Armed with millions of existing recipes and untethered from pesky humanoid cultural biases, Watson can spit out dish ideas like Austrian-chocolate burritos and Swiss-Thai asparagus quiche. If you want to know what artificial culinary genius tastes like, some of Watson's brainchildren will be served from a food truck at SXSW in Austin this month.

Yes, intelligent robots can do a lot of amazing things. They can perform life-saving surgeries and vacuum my apartment while I play Candy Crush. Yes, machines play a vital role in food production, from the "smart" tractors that maximize crop yields to those little nozzles that squirt just the right amount of filling into Twinkies. And yes, Ferran Adria seems like he could very possibly be a cyborg sent from the future. But the idea of HAL running the pass at the Michelin 3-star restaurants of tomorrow? Not likely, in my opinion. I would argue that the process of inventing truly delightful, novel dishes is too cerebral and creative to be co-opted by gizmos.

I once read about a computer program that claimed to produce history's most statistically beautiful landscape painting by analyzing the greatest masterworks of all time and finding their commonalities. The result – a wan, lifeless stretch of countryside that would not have been out of place in an airport hotel room – proved nothing more than the absurdity of "statistical beauty" to begin with. With cuisine as with painting, music, or any other art form, the best compositions are the ones that touch something in our deepest, darkest, most human places. Great dishes spark a memory or stir an emotion; they don't simply press the "yummy" button. Supercomputers might be able to suggest food combinations that surprise us with their non-grossness, but that's different from achieving the sublime: that magic x-factor that describes great feats of artistry, and can't be isolated, picked apart, and reverse-engineered with the help of big data.

So please, IBM, leave the tinkering with bizarre food combinations to the Rene Redzepis and Grant Achatzes of the world. They seem to be doing just fine on their own.